With the advent of the 1992 Olympics and the ensuing waves of athletes, delegates, and other official paparazzi, Barcelona--or its electronic image, at least--is now at the focal point of world concern. The city that El Caudillo--Francisco Franco--kept drab and grey until he (finally) died has been entirely re-tailored for the critical electronic eye. Word has it, in fact, that the Barcelonese spent close to $10 billion on their nothing-but-enormous urban renovation program.

But such grand gestures should come as no surprise. The Barcelonese exude a near-fanatical pride in their ancient city, 2000-year long series of civic re-inventions. Understanding--let alone appreciating-this puzzling letimotif in the history of the newly resplendent city-by-the-sea would demand the intellectual ardor of a cabala scholar.

Enter Barcelona by Robert Hughes, the chronicle of a city foretold.

Hughes, who has been Time magazine's art critic for the past two decades, has penned an exciting and timely civic history. In one sumptuous two thousand year sweep, Hughes jettisons the deadness of prose that most readers associate with History and instead writes with the same electric, cobaltblue style that colors his art writing. While presenting an astonishing array of historical bric-a -brac, Hughes also welds together history and culture, politics and architecture, into an incisive textual amalgam.

What Hughes makes clear to us at the outset is that, like most any other city, Barcelona is made legible only in the context of its past. And the easiest access to the past is inscribed in the city's profoundly variegated architecture. "The political and economic history of Barcelona," Hughes writes, "is written all over its plan and building." From the small Roman colony known as Barcino founded circa 15 A.D., to the present Olympic-banner festooned metropolis, Hughes carefully recovers the past through an anecdote-laced archaeology. What surfaces is a sense of Barcelona, and the region known as Catalunya which surrounds it, as a distinct cultural and political entitywithin the much larger Iberian peninsula.

Central to this sense of cultural and political uniqueness is the Catalan language. As Hughes observes, "In Catalunya, language and politics are entwined , interwoven, inseparable." During the dictatorship of Franco, in fact, one way of stamping out any leftover feelings of rebellion was to ban the public use of Catalan. When writers could not be published in Catalan, they used it as a gesture of political defiance.

Barcelona

by Robert Hughes Alfred A. Knopf $27.50

The beginnings of Barcelona's feisty sense of autonomy lie embedded deeply within its lexical past. Contrary to popular belief, Catalan is not a bastardized version of Castilian, but a proper language in its own right. When the Romans conquered the Iberian peninsula, as Hughes tells us, they brought with them, two kinds of Latin from two distinct socio-economic classes. While the Roman elite went south to the silver mines (and hence, the money), the Roman farmers and laborers settled in the fertile northern regions, bringing their more modern, "slangy" Latin with them.

It is from these humble origins that the city first arose. While the rest of Spain speaks Castilian, Barcelona and Catalunya claim Catalan as their own; its existence as a language apart bolsters the region's own sense of political and cultural identity. The cultivation of the land by the region's first farmers also aided this nation-building process. Even today, as Hughes readily informs us Barcelona is "more a city of capital and labor than of nobility and commerce," and "its democratic roots are old and run very deep."

This sense of democratic tradition is one of the two most enduring features of the city. On account of its lively plebian past, the city has always had something of a chip on its shoulder towards any centralized authority. And during much of the past 500 years, or ever since Phillip II established Madrid as the Spanish capital, much of Barcelona's ire has been directed towards her sister city sprawling in the middle of the peninsula's arid plains.

From Phillip II onward, the Castile-based court has treated Barcelona as something like an ugly sister. Naturally, there has always been a rivalry, but Barcelona has been getting the worst of it as of late (perhaps staging the Olympic Games, something of a coup for Barcelona, will change all that). Nevertheless, that city has a past that stretches back for 2000 years, and the first half is nothing short of glorious.

Hughes races through the first 18 centuries or so like an inspired Aureliano Babilonia (the famous character from One Hundred Years of Solitude who deciphers the Buendia family history and tragic end). He takes us through the long and often bloody history of class struggle, cataloguing the numerous rebellions and political in-fighting that awkwardly grace the city archives. As is usually the case with these clashes, they are between the haves and the have-nots. And as the for city's demographics attest, Barcelona has long been a haven for the have-nots.

But it wasn't always this way. For a time. Barcelona was actually a kind of king-of-the-hill among city-states.

Barcelona's glory really began in the ninth century, with Guifre el Pelos (literally, Wilfred the Hairy--his famed hairiness has since passed into legend) leading the way to independence against the invading Moors. As the first genuine national (read: Catalan) hero, he began a noble line of political--and hairy--agitators.

In fact, Hughes speculates that since of Wilfred, the presence of healthy, bouyant hair has become a signifier of prowess: "The immense bigotis (mustaches) and patillas (muttonchop whiskers) sported by Barcelonese industrialists 1000 years later may, in their walruslike magnificence, have seemed to some of their owners to claim the virtues of Guifreel Pelos."

The next 500 years proved an uplifting time for the Catalans. They were years of economic expansion and political self-assertion. Before Columbus ever sailed for the New World, the allied kingdoms of Catalunya and Aragon already possessed a far-ranging Mediterranean empire. And in what was to become a predictable pattern (aside from the city's prodigious capacity to re-invent itself time and time again), the citizens of the city fought for their rights during many nerve-fraught periods. Their successes are notable: the Usatges, for instance, dates from a century before the Magna Carta and is essentially a medieval charter of citizen's rights. In addition, the Consell de Cent (Council of One Hundred), in its day, was the oldest proto-democratic political body in Spain.

The book admiringly traces the evolution of these irrepressible democratic impulses, but they become less important when set beside the city's magnificently mixed-up architecture, an aggregate of different periods and styles. Architecture is the second of Barcelona's most enduring features after democracy, and fittingly enough, Hughes treats this subject at length (he is an art critic, after all).

Hughes's starting point is simple: architecture is a form of political expression invariable available only to those in power. It provides a kind of ready-made syntax that allows a political institution to represent its power through the planning of a city, or the construction of a building.

By acting as a symbol, a building can resonate with much greater force in the cultural consciousness; it is like an empty vessel that has been filled with a culturally-endowed meaning. During the occupation of Barcelona by the Bourbons in the eighteenth century, for example, the construction of the Ciutadella (the Citadel of Barcelona) became a hated symbol of Bourbon tyranny.

From the Roman walls built 20 centuries ago to the weird and wonderful creations of Gaudi, Hughes spends much of the book recounting the history in order to explain the architecture--examining the roots in order to look more closely at the tree, as he might put it. Much of the most penetrating commentary--as well as some of the funniest apercus--is in the second half of the book.

This is where Hughes' obvious talents as an art historian consistently convince and impress us. The sheer force of the narrative that Hughes crafts from the most basis elements of the city--its buildings--arrives in the sensual pleasure of the writing. He takes on the architecture of the Eixample (the enlargement of the city which occurred in the ninteenth century--like Domenech and Gaudi--are never separated from the cultural context of Catalan modernisme and the anarchists' movements of the 1890's.

Throughout, Hughes adroitly analyzes the architectural syntax of the city by way of its ideological underpinnings. What we discover is that, more often than not, the Catalan drive for self-definition has been projected and voiced through the urban landscape of Barcelona itself.